Yes. A little late, maybe.
I need to get my skin ready for Crete's sun and just one week is left. Precautions must be taken and the block where I live is equipped with a beautiful pool in the middle of a carefully looked after lawn.
My masochistic ego came out and at two o'clock in the afternoon I wore my bathing costume and went to the lawn. The day was perfect: the sun was burning but many clouds walking in the sky contributed to many 5 minutes' breaks during which a fresh wind gave relax to the skin. A couple of cold showers every thirteen minutes also helped to keep my skin temperature at a reasonable level. A couple of hours later I returned home, had the last cold shower and I'm now preparing to go out and drink a beer.
Folks, this is life: I was missing sunny days a lot!
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Holidays in Crete
Have you ever thought about about the oldest greek civilization, the Minoans? Have you ever daydreamed about Knossos palace, Theseus, the Minotaur, the labyrinth, or the escape from Crete of Daedalus and Icarus?
Well, I've done many times and it was time for me to visit Crete. I'm very excited at the idea of returning to Greece and Crete just seems the right choice to spend this week of June. Crete is the 5th largest island of the Mediterranean Sea after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus and Corsica. In common imagery, Crete is the homeland of the eldest Greek civilization, the Minoans, some myths of whom got to us through Homer's Odyssey and Greek mythology.
We'll arrive at the Chania (Χανιά) Airport next Saturday in the morning. We'll rent a car and hit the road to Rethymno (Ρέθυμνο), where we'll we have dinner before reaching our destination, Panormos, a small Venetian-style village at 20 km. from Panormos.
Unfortunately, we'll stay in Crete just 7 days, which are probably the required minimum to begin to feel the place and to start to forget Madrid's M{30,40,42,50}. I haven't planned the vacations with full details, yet, but at a very minimum I want to pay a visit to Rethymnon, Heraklion and the Knossos' palace archaeological site. Also, I want to spend one day on a wild beach on the south of the Island. The only things I'll bring from Spain will be a good selection of sun and after-sun creams to protect and quench the thirst of my skin.
There will be no cellular phone, no computer. Every silicon-based device will be banned with the only exception of the GPS.
I'm really looking forward going away from Madrid!
Well, I've done many times and it was time for me to visit Crete. I'm very excited at the idea of returning to Greece and Crete just seems the right choice to spend this week of June. Crete is the 5th largest island of the Mediterranean Sea after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus and Corsica. In common imagery, Crete is the homeland of the eldest Greek civilization, the Minoans, some myths of whom got to us through Homer's Odyssey and Greek mythology.
We'll arrive at the Chania (Χανιά) Airport next Saturday in the morning. We'll rent a car and hit the road to Rethymno (Ρέθυμνο), where we'll we have dinner before reaching our destination, Panormos, a small Venetian-style village at 20 km. from Panormos.
Unfortunately, we'll stay in Crete just 7 days, which are probably the required minimum to begin to feel the place and to start to forget Madrid's M{30,40,42,50}. I haven't planned the vacations with full details, yet, but at a very minimum I want to pay a visit to Rethymnon, Heraklion and the Knossos' palace archaeological site. Also, I want to spend one day on a wild beach on the south of the Island. The only things I'll bring from Spain will be a good selection of sun and after-sun creams to protect and quench the thirst of my skin.
There will be no cellular phone, no computer. Every silicon-based device will be banned with the only exception of the GPS.
I'm really looking forward going away from Madrid!
Monday, May 11, 2009
Sleepless nights in Brussels
I really hoped that the next time I'd visit Brussels would be on vacations but Murphy's law never fail and my colleagues called me for help, and there I flew.
Long story short, because I don't even feel like talking about Microsoft SQL Server: performance of a brand-new system was really bad (well, nothing strange, that's why we had planned performance and stress tests...) and deadlocks started to appear.
So here I am, and this morning it's the new system Big Bang. A couple of sleepless night profiling and optimizing the application and everything seems ready to go.
Long story short, because I don't even feel like talking about Microsoft SQL Server: performance of a brand-new system was really bad (well, nothing strange, that's why we had planned performance and stress tests...) and deadlocks started to appear.
So here I am, and this morning it's the new system Big Bang. A couple of sleepless night profiling and optimizing the application and everything seems ready to go.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Sparing disk space with ZFS clones while setting up a developer environment for multiple users
I have got some Solaris 10 workstations which are shared by a bunch of users which daily develop their application in the native Solaris 10 OS. Every user has to be able to log in in whichever machine and use his own environment. For this reason we took the usual approach of setting up NFS remote mounting of home directories and managing user accounts in an LDAP.
The developers also use a virtualized Windows and a virtualized Debian GNU/Linux during their duties and the initial deploy of the workstations didn't take into account the viability of accessing via NFS files as big as xVM hard disks. Replicating hard disk images was an issue and saving workstations hard disk space was another: with an average 15 GB per hard disk (OS and applications fully configured), per OS, per user, the 200 GB hard disk that equips the workstations seemed insufficient.
In this case, and in all the cases where you can share at least an initial set of data, ZFS helped us solving this problem. ZFS clones are filesystems generated from a snapshot of another ZFS filesystem. Initially a clone consumes no space and, as modifications starts to be applied, it begin to diverge from the snapshot it was generated from and starts allocating space. In our case, I snapshotted the initial installation of Sun xVM VirtualBox, I created a clone per user and set the mountpoint of the ZFS filesystem into the user home directory:
The developers also use a virtualized Windows and a virtualized Debian GNU/Linux during their duties and the initial deploy of the workstations didn't take into account the viability of accessing via NFS files as big as xVM hard disks. Replicating hard disk images was an issue and saving workstations hard disk space was another: with an average 15 GB per hard disk (OS and applications fully configured), per OS, per user, the 200 GB hard disk that equips the workstations seemed insufficient.
In this case, and in all the cases where you can share at least an initial set of data, ZFS helped us solving this problem. ZFS clones are filesystems generated from a snapshot of another ZFS filesystem. Initially a clone consumes no space and, as modifications starts to be applied, it begin to diverge from the snapshot it was generated from and starts allocating space. In our case, I snapshotted the initial installation of Sun xVM VirtualBox, I created a clone per user and set the mountpoint of the ZFS filesystem into the user home directory:
# zfs snapshot virtualbox/installation/dir@initialZFS clones spared me a lot of troubles and, moreover, every user has got a dedicated filesystems for its VirtualBox with all of the advantages provided by ZFS such as snapshots, restores and backups. We used the same approach to provide a common set of low-volatility filesystems to our users such as big SVN repositories and documentation directories.
# zfs clone virtualbox/installation/dir@initial virtualbox/users/name-0
...
# zfs clone virtualbox/installation/dir@initial virtualbox/users/name-n
# zfs set mountpoint=/export/name-0/.VirtualBox virtualbox/users/name-0
...
# zfs set mountpoint=/export/name-n/.VirtualBox virtualbox/users/name-0
Thursday, May 7, 2009
The perfect guide to the trash bin
This morning, as usual, I had my cup of coffee and started reading the press and one of my favorites, the real newspaper must-read is Beppe Severgnini's Italians. Today's article is titled The perfect guide to the trash bin. I'll quickly translate it here.
Safe driving to the trash bin. Or: how to write a kamikaze email, doomed to crash into the "Deleted Items". Few lines are sufficient, containing the right terms, to guarantee null attention and, with some effort, even a certain resentment on the unaware addressee. Some examples, taken from the first lines of unsolicited emails, received in a few hours. The final number (in brackets) indicates the time spent in my inbox.
"In Rome May 14th the guru of marketing..." (3") In Rome in May it seems that everything happens (as in Milan in October), and this is a handicap for the (reckless) sender. The words "guru" and "marketing", together, work as a shot gun in a herd of cats: all on the run!
"Dear Journalist, enclosed the press release in question that I hope will be of interest to Your newspaper. Do not hesitate to contact me for more information" (7"). None of my coworkers, to my knowledge, has never contacted the author of such press releases. Indeed, no: I believe it happened, on March 30 2007, but the news was never confirmed.
"Dearest, I am happy to announce an appointment within the cycle of meetings..." (2")
"Dearest" is written in blue, "etc. I am happy..." in black: the apparent copy-and-paste increases mistrust, made high by the "cycle of meetings" (a circular formation that Alighieri thought to include in his Inferno).
"Invitation - Only for extraordinary creatures - an unmissable event - An opportunity to celebrate the prestigious..." (4")
"Unmissable", "prestigious" and "extraordinary" are three spy adjectives: when you read them, red alert! They replaced "exclusive" and "VIP", in vogue during the nineties and now confined in the provincial clubs and resorts.
"Dear friends, I must inform you that applications are open for..." (1")
Applications will be opened at the speed with which you close certain emails: it's an ongoing challenge. I must tell you that this was an interesting case: it was, in fact, a dance course ("The best student will be invited to exhibit in Bulgaria!").
''LET'S BUILD THE TURNING POINT - Dear Doctors, attached to the present we send you the number of May 2009'' (8 ", the surprise has caused me to reread).
''LET'S BUILD THE TURNING POINT'': just the private motorway companies are authorized to use such a language. Then: please avoid Capitals, FOR GOD'S SAKE! At last: how do they know that we're all ''Doctors''? And those who, with effort, have succeeded in not being it?
Safe driving to the trash bin. Or: how to write a kamikaze email, doomed to crash into the "Deleted Items". Few lines are sufficient, containing the right terms, to guarantee null attention and, with some effort, even a certain resentment on the unaware addressee. Some examples, taken from the first lines of unsolicited emails, received in a few hours. The final number (in brackets) indicates the time spent in my inbox.
"In Rome May 14th the guru of marketing..." (3") In Rome in May it seems that everything happens (as in Milan in October), and this is a handicap for the (reckless) sender. The words "guru" and "marketing", together, work as a shot gun in a herd of cats: all on the run!
"Dear Journalist, enclosed the press release in question that I hope will be of interest to Your newspaper. Do not hesitate to contact me for more information" (7"). None of my coworkers, to my knowledge, has never contacted the author of such press releases. Indeed, no: I believe it happened, on March 30 2007, but the news was never confirmed.
"Dearest, I am happy to announce an appointment within the cycle of meetings..." (2")
"Dearest" is written in blue, "etc. I am happy..." in black: the apparent copy-and-paste increases mistrust, made high by the "cycle of meetings" (a circular formation that Alighieri thought to include in his Inferno).
"Invitation - Only for extraordinary creatures - an unmissable event - An opportunity to celebrate the prestigious..." (4")
"Unmissable", "prestigious" and "extraordinary" are three spy adjectives: when you read them, red alert! They replaced "exclusive" and "VIP", in vogue during the nineties and now confined in the provincial clubs and resorts.
"Dear friends, I must inform you that applications are open for..." (1")
Applications will be opened at the speed with which you close certain emails: it's an ongoing challenge. I must tell you that this was an interesting case: it was, in fact, a dance course ("The best student will be invited to exhibit in Bulgaria!").
''LET'S BUILD THE TURNING POINT - Dear Doctors, attached to the present we send you the number of May 2009'' (8 ", the surprise has caused me to reread).
''LET'S BUILD THE TURNING POINT'': just the private motorway companies are authorized to use such a language. Then: please avoid Capitals, FOR GOD'S SAKE! At last: how do they know that we're all ''Doctors''? And those who, with effort, have succeeded in not being it?
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